Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 58

Super 8 Review by Alien Grak-Pha Teekelp

Ecstatic Days is pleased to present guest reviewer Grak-Pha Teekelp's review of the new Spielberg-Abrams film Super 8. Teekelp is a space alien from a planet about 1,000,000 light years from here, and thus has a unique perspective on the movie. PLEASE NOTE: The review contains spoilers.

Super 8 From an "Extra-Terrestrial" Point of View

by Grak-Pha Teekelp (approximate name)

Well, um, I certainly don't want to criticize Abrams or Spielberg, since I recognize that on your planet they're popular filmmakers, even sometimes considered auteurs,** but while watching Super 8 me and some of the other "aliens" who sometimes drop by this solar system had a hard time suspending disbelief.

The beginning of the movie is I suppose a nice portrait of some of your larval forms bonding while trying to make their own amateur film. I was somewhat put off by the fact that these supposed friends did not assimilate each other's bodies and excrete them afterwards to reconstitute and solidify that friendship, but maybe that's just me. (I was impressed by the durability of these larval forms however—our offspring at that stage of development would certainly have been decapitated, squashed, or shot in any number of scenes, but your larvae just blithely soldier on.)

Anyway, once the alien comes on the scene, the movie largely became a comedy for me and my friends. First of all, the main rule of transporting hostile intelligent lifeforms, as should be obvious, is not by bucolic train ride across a couple thousand miles of terrain. The main rule is do not transport hostile intelligent lifeforms if already in a secure location, especially if their level of technology is superior to your own.

The second rule is if you are transporting a huge hostile alien via train, don't transport in the same train the small unpainted Rubic's Cubes that the alien needs to reconstruct their spaceship and blast off for home. Certainly, it seemed odd your military would then transport said cubes into the very town where the alien had taken refuge after its escape, even in a work of fiction.

But, really, it's the little white cubes that had us laughing. Trust me when I say, the standard emergency kit we all carry with us includes a tiny…well, so you can understand, let's call it a 3-D printer, and at the mental touch of a button, presto!, back-up spaceship. Certainly, no one we know of uses little blocks to construct spacecraft. Living meat ships, yes. Ships made of something akin to plastic, yes. Tiny little cubes…no. But, you know–creative license, I guess.

We'll also ignore the unlikely shape and physical characteristics of the alien, but, please, we want you to know: you can keep creating Predator-type aliens, and even blend them with giant spiders, but there really aren't any intelligent species with these characteristics. It was fun the first few times, but now it's beginning to really be boring for us. (Oh, and the three telepathic species don't have to lay claws or hands on you to read your thoughts…or to crush your brains and splatter them across the floor.)

Perhaps the biggest laughs came from the reveal of the machine the alien created to facilitate its return home, presumably some kind of launching system. This ad hoc, cobbled-together monstrosity made of all kinds of useless things really brought on the giggles. It's somewhat endearing that you humans would think that your refrigerator motors, car engines, and go-carts would, when shoved together into a kind of dump site, help power a spaceship, but…no. Still–riotously funny!!

Um, and all those humans tied and hanging comatose upside down, as part of the alien's machine…wow, I mean, that's gotta be some reflexive visual half-heartedly stolen from that movie Alien, because I have to tell you: humans are even more useless as parts for spaceship launchers. As for all of the devouring of humans…nothing on your planet is palatable to anyone anywhere in the galaxy. This is the primary reason you haven't yet been killed and eaten by some space-going species. (That, and it's rude behavior.)

Another hoot for me personally was that Christmas tree of a spaceship at the end, because if we really used running lights like that—or any kind of illumination visible to your instruments or your eyes—you'd have known about us a whole lot sooner. No, the only alien spaceship "sightings" with any legitimacy are the ones where someone just sees a patch of darkness in the sky at night that looks a little darker than usual. Certainly, there's no reason for the alien in the movie to draw any attention to himself.

My other objections are really nit-picky, I guess. The scenes with the tanks aren't well-blocked and as mentioned your larvae have a lot of agency—my word, they're more competent than the adults! And your military…if I didn't know better I'd think they're a bunch of idiots.

And, just from a stink-of-the-obvious objection, does the larval form at the end that lost its mother have to let go of the locket as if symbolically letting go of his mother? Does that really have to happen? Does it…reeeeeaaalllllyyyyy?

Granted, not many of your SF movies or books do much more than perplex us or give us the giggles. ET is another winner. Dune. Those Star Wars movies—wow. Just: wow.

Somebody on your world should make movies out of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. They're not accurate either, but the adaptations made over here have made a lot of money.

**Worth noting: Spielberg's ranking for filmmakers in your solar system, including other civilizations that've died out previously on Saturn, Venus, and Mars, is a somewhat luke-warm 14,045th, right after Venusian ~~~!~**, best known for its 14-hour epic the title of which translates roughly as "Ruminations on the Underbelly of [Local Lifeform] as Considered by a Parasite." Abrams is not yet ranked.

Super 8 Review by Alien Grak-Pha Teekelp originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 10, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck: Entry #5

Archives: scroll down for previous installments. You bastards aren't reading anyway.

Intel from surveillance today has had a thready, inconsistent quality. More than ever, I've been unable to see the patterns, to understand how it all fits together. In quick succession, glimpses of: a strange library on the top of a mountain, men struggling against a storm in an antiquated ship with huge sails, three women consoling a forth in a graveyard, enormous floating creatures shooting bolts of lightning at one another while below shouting crowds of people like shoals of fish ran back and forth. An ant struggling to hold a blade of grass. The innards of a clock winding down. A man praying in a temple.

But then attention seemed to resolve upon a wintery city under siege, the wings of our luna moths dusted with snowflakes, a battle played out under gray skies. The mortar fire was like the shriek of birds—and became the shriek of birds, because the starlings began to mimic the sound after several days. Glue and water boiled with bay leaves to make a terrible soup. Belts with nettle and vinegar for another soup. Rats tossed whole into the fire to roast, with no time to put them on spits, desperate men and women in rags shooting from behind pitted, gouged walls at their enemies. A slow-motion war in the snow, even in the best boots…and some didn't even have shoes, wrapping pieces of cloth to protect blue-bruised feet. Stolid, sullen, broken architecture framing faces and bodies whose own architecture displayed the harsh lines and utility of starvation, even from under hats and layers of clothing.

But this war was not our observers' objective. A room in a deserted hospital with its roof blown off, the snow falling and coating the floors—that was where our luna moths congregated in this blighted city. The moths formed a living green cloud covering the walls and tables. If any of the combatants had seen this happening they would have thought it a hallucination: moths impervious to the weather killing so many human beings. And there, on the tables, frozen canisters containing the cremains of psychiatric patients. Old, old, old, much older than the concepts the two sides were killing each other over. Remains that had become ossified, spilling out from the rusted canisters. Strange shades of azure and amber and bronze and frothy white. Soon, under the analysis of the moths, the canisters came to reside in our laboratory, leaving facsimiles behind. And the moths rose in a swirling funnel and disappeared into the sky, leaving attackers and besieged to their bone-cold torment.

In the laboratory, we now have twelve canisters of human ashes. Tomorrow there will be twelve people in the laboratory not there before. The angels seem excited by this discovery. But I have no idea what it means. It makes me feel uneasy.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck: Entry #5 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 10, 2011.

If You Were Here: The Top 30 All Time Science Fiction and Fantasy Worlds

As some of you may know, I'm writing a nonfiction book for Victoria Blake's Underland Press entitled If You Lived Here: The Top 30 All Time Science Fiction and Fantasy Worlds. That book now has a recommendation site where you can submit your own favorites, with your explanation, and perhaps even be quoted in the book. Victoria will also be contacting booksellers for their thoughts.

If You Lived Here won't be your standard reference text. It will be thorough, and well-researched, but it will also be irreverent, entertaining, and in some ways use a mutated form of the travel guide (and that world's most dangerous places book) to showcase the material. It'll include some essays as well, covering books or series not included in the top 30, a couple of lists, and illustrations.

What will be in that top 30? Well, we're listening to you, even as we also have our own thoughts about it. George R.R. Martin, you say? Maybe Borges? Maybe Atwood? Possibly Delany? Who else? Everybody's potentially in the mix.

So go ahead and cast your vote—we'll be collecting your thoughts for at least two months—and you can also if you like discuss it on this thread—or over at SF Signal in about an hour. They're being kind enough to signal boost it.

If You Were Here: The Top 30 All Time Science Fiction and Fantasy Worlds originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 9, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck, Entry #4

Archives: Entry #3, Entry #2 and Entry #1.

Who can blame anyone for mistaking them for angels, these people I work for, these people who have taken me in? Who can blame anyone for creating the myth of angels, or the "angels" for using it?

On this outpost, "this backwater planet at the end of nowhere," as the bear-sentinel Seether calls it, the arrival of the angels from far-flung missions can be as dramatic as a sunrise or as stealthy as turning to discover a person sitting in a chair empty the moment before.

But it's for the dramatics that I love them, although I know it's a weakness. They dare to take chances, and so instead of riddling their way through the Rips to come home—really all the way home, safe—some of them will enter in the upper atmosphere, calculating how long it will take for their incredibly strong wings to burn up, and coming hurtling down, on fire, like fiery jewels. And I send the skein of my senses rushing up to meet them, to experience their fall. Weaving and diving, feet-first and head-first, they careen down in droves at times, coordinating their descents.

Most of the time, they guess correctly, and make it to the laboratory grounds, their wings crumpled and glistening black-brown like burnt sugar but having performed almost like parachutes. The wings will grow back. Everything grows back on them; they even have a tolerance for the vacuum of space. Some of them get drunk on it.

The ones not so lucky smash screaming into the lawns and smolder there until the medics come. I hear the impact above me, reverberating through my skull, and I send out my tendrils to investigate. They lie there, shrieking and laughing at the same time. Writhing in a spasm of something that's not just pain. They look like heaps of smoking, quivering tar but smell like honeysuckle. These cases take longer to heal, but their misfortune isn't seen as frivolous by the others. When you're almost immortal, your idea of play isn't the same as for other beings. Your idea of play is almost as important as the missions you cross galaxies, decades, and dimensions to carry out.

Stationary mountain-sized monster that I am, I revel in their joy, their mobility, their risk-taking. I forgive everything because of it. They are so beautiful I might even be able to forgive the slaughter of hundreds, of thousands, for love of them. At least for a little while.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck, Entry #4 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 9, 2011.

Interview Questions I Never Want to Be Asked Again

What is Steampunk?

Why do you write about squid?

Why do you write about mushrooms?

Why aren't there airplanes in Ambergris?

Why are you so anti-fungi?

Why is your writing so weird?

Why are you so mean to your characters?

What are you wearing?

Interview Questions I Never Want to Be Asked Again originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 9, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck, Entry #3

Archives: Entry #2 and Entry #1.

I've forgotten what I wanted to relate, because I'm drunk, or "pissed" as one of the angels, the humans, says. It takes a lot to get a monster as big as a mountain drunk. It takes my rooting filaments tapping into sweet hallucinogenic sap of other plants. It takes my fellow observers pouring pint after pint of rotgut down a throat I created just for the purpose. But it can be done! Gloriously, riotously done!

I'm a happy drunk for the most part. I see sunbeams and novas. I relax and think everything across the universes is wonderful. I contain multitudes, but durnk, I am but one person, no different than my fellow experimenters, no different in my bleary rants and affirmations of solidarity. I'm not a monster at all. I'm your best friend, your confidante.

And yet…part of me is still sealed off from all of that. Part of me is monitoring information lightyears away, brought from luna moths and komodo dragons and from bears that rip open to reveal doors and much more horrific things that don't need thinking about, and which, luckily, you don't think about when durnk. No, durnk is a state of bliss when considering things like geo-political social situations across multiple alt-worlds. Or wars between species thought of as angels and demons but all too…human?…humanoid?

But that's too sad to bear thinking about. Time for another drink poured down the artificial throat. I think this one's a screwdriver! I think! The screwdriver to beat all screwdrivers!

Yes, I'm one of them. Finally. Forever. or until the morning hangover.

Big as a mountain. Small as mouse. Drunk as a louse.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck, Entry #3 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 8, 2011.

Overlays: The Value of Temporary Structures

(Critics who use in-progress process posts as proof of anything in finished books are jerks and will not be tolerated.)

Avast! When you return to a novel you last looked at a few months before and you're like me—which is to say, there might be three typewritten alternative drafts and two explorations in handwriting—it takes a bit to get up to speed. Is this me complaining about my own work habits? Hell no. The whole point of my process is inefficiency. Getting too quickly to where you want to go, getting there too smoothly, is antithetical to thinking through complex issues. You want roadblocks, confusion, chaos, and doubt. Unexpected, wonderful things come out of this approach, too.

But I have indeed spent the whole day sorting through variations and looking at the structure of the 25,000 words I've got on the page. One thing that just kept annoying me beyond belief was the amount of really cool exposition I needed to cut to keep the foregrounded story moving forward. This is pretty basic stuff, but sometimes your description is doing a lot of other things, like deepening character. Other stuff just needs to go or be rearranged.

What I did find is that rethinking the structure of Borne helped a lot. I had thought of the book as being in two parts, and the sort of book where you get a lot of context up front. As I was looking over scenes with the title character, I realized I should experiment with a three-part structure, and suddenly the whole idea of what scenes had to go where changed drastically, as well as what kind of approach this novel needs in terms of context and divulging certain kinds of information.

First off, thinking of the novel in three parts, roughly corresponding to stages in Borne's development, meant that scenes involving other characters could now be spread out across all three sections. Before, I'd been thinking in terms of the narrator's story arc, but that's not going to be the structural determinant for the novel, as it turns out. Unspooling Borne-related stuff also allows this other spreading-out noted above. It also, for some reason, now means setting context will be situated more node-like at regular intervals along the way. This means the first place I go into extended description is much shorter, and the space created fills up with more of the emotional lives of the characters. And I can relax into that knowing the rest of what I need is coming later, and isn't needed for reader understanding due to the new pacing and the new ways in which the past and present communicate with one another in the text.

It doesn't even really matter if I wind up actually dividing the book into three sections, or I just hold that in my head as a construct and do chapters 1 through 20 without any section breaks. The point is, the re-think has allowed for better, more useful ways to distribute scenes and info, while also revealing what material isn't needed at all. Something about visualizing the novel as a two-parter was also obscuring unintended repetition and wastefulness in what was on the page.

This is all a very dry way of saying that structure isn't actually an abstract thing. It's also not always an organic thing, in that you try out different approaches mechanically in aid of getting to a place where everything in the text becomes effortless and organic.

As a kind of side note, I've also had a great time on more of a sentence level applying lessons learned from Steve Erickson's (author of Zeroville) edits to the excerpt of Borne appearing in Black Clock magazine. In the context of finalizing the piece for his mag, I thought of the edits as regular copy-edits, but in the context of revising and moving forward on new sections of Borne at novel-length, I now interpret them as character-related instead. Which is to say, most of the deletions and changes affect how the reader perceives the main character. What is understated by the cuts emphasizes different elements. What is now brought to the front also creates different emphasis. This in effect makes subtle but important changes to the character…and in charting why I think these changes were made, I have gained a much better understanding about the person I'm writing about, and this also now radiates out into my editing of the rest of the draft as it stands.

The good news, from my standpoint, is that because several scenes now bleed into part two, I am much farther along on the novel than I thought. It means I have new scenes to write in part one, but that's preferable to being more adrift in the middle. This, too, is the advantage of thinking about the structure differently: I no longer have concerns about sag in the middle because of the redistribution of previously front-loaded scenes into that section. The third act is crystal clear in my head, so that was really the last challenge in terms of how to present the material.

Especially in a short novel, like Borne will no doubt be, getting it all right on this kind of technical level is key to the emotional resonance for readers. Pacing, correct development, managing progression aren't issues of craft—they're issues intrinsic to success at deeper, more psychological levels. Graham Joyce's The Silent Land is a perfect example—if Joyce's craft weren't brilliant, his insight into human relationships would be useless, because it would be deployed within a malformed novel.

And so instead of a post on the movie Carlos or another Doctor Mormeck entry, you have this, my little weirdlings. I hope you find it interesting. Or maybe I don't hope anything. Mostly, I'm just happy to be writing.

Overlays: The Value of Temporary Structures originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 8, 2011.

Borne Goop: Repurposing the Goop

Sometimes goop gets in the way. Working through my novel Borne, I'm exasperated by some of the exposition that feels inert even though it may not be—it may just need to be recontextualized, broken up, or made to do more work through half-scene. So, goop below. I keep coming up with new combinations, new entry points, to make this stuff work. And sometimes, you just have to throw almost all of it away. Even posting the stuff here is a way of getting a clearer view of it–different font, different location can equal a new way of seeing it.

(BTW–not all of my blog entries are posting to facebook, so don't rely on facebook for updates.)

***

Have I told you where we were while we had this conversation? Not just on a balcony jutting from a cliff, overlooking a poison river, but the rest of it?

We lived in the remains of what I had dubbed the Balcony Cliffs apartment complex. The original name on the rusted placard in the half-collapsed lobby had been written in a language I didn't know, using letters with which I was unfamiliar. Seen by gas lamps, then burning rags on poles, then Wick's fireflies.

Back behind us, there were lines that I was intensely aware of, almost as if wires coming out of my head merged with the lines, the whole mass of corridors and tunnels at my back become attached to sensors in my head. Trip wires, too, because Wick had connected everything to everything, and all of that to the fluttering flounder-creature in a shallow pan that functioned as command-and-control in his suite of rooms. If I'd drawn the Balcony Cliffs on a map, it would have looked like a cut-away of the side of a massive mound of debris and garbage and broken girders and abandoned refrigerators, washers, dryers, burnt-out automobiles…all of it on top of or nestled within a dense ground cover of half-dirt, half-moss-and-loam that carried with it a springy, almost jaunty feel at odds with the devastation of the scene. A landscape shot through with the new growth of what some might call tall gnarled bushes and others might call short, stunted trees.

Under that weight, within that cross-section of the body that served as our home, the lines connected to the stick figure in the balcony chair would reach out to connect with corridors forged back through the mound, some of them dead-ends leading to places where the collective roof had fallen in or where supporting beams had decided they'd suffered enough neglect and could no longer support any weight. Corridors? Tunnels? The distinction had been lost, as I'd hollowed out, over time, the best of them, and left the rest of them to rot. One route led to Wick's rooms and, a little closer to the middle, where the lines got confused on purpose: my apartment. From there, heading to the western edge of the mound, which faced, across the great divide of the city itself, the Company buildings, the confusion multiplied itself, resulting in a confusing maze for any unexpected visitors thinking about making it past Wick's guard spiders and distorting pheromones…before simplifying again at the exit to three passageways, only one of which led anywhere safe, and before that the door, which was, from the outside, just another part of the mound, obliterated by the welter of moss and vines. A strong smell of carrion, one of Wick's more inspired artificial masterpieces, grew stronger the closer you came to it. Sometimes, even I had trouble finding the secret entrance on that western flank.

And all of these lines came from me, my brain, the tripwires for traps, just because I had found the place early and the others living there had died first. There wasn't actually much space to live in, and not many Wick had trusted to enter or share that space. With me he'd had no choice: I had lived there before he arrived, and I had invited him in after finding him trailing Mord suicidally, like a lost puppy not able to tell threat from sanctuary.

Less controllable: the "cliff" face itself, the eastern edge of the mound, overlooking that insane river of filth. Wick had created a kind of weird "mosquito netting" out of special spider webs, which disguised us from anyone who might stumble onto the other balconies jutting like stone chins, but still allowed us to see out. Sometimes, to our surprise, we would see people on those balconies, the nearest still far enough to the north that it wasn't a security risk to the mound. They always looked, by dint of distance, like sightsee-ers, tourists come to look out over the cliff down and across at the scenic view. We knew they were more dangerous than that—probably the descendents of factory workers who still lived in the gutted remains to the north of the heavy industry that had failed the city and the world. But of an evening, sitting there, we could pretend for a few minutes that we did indeed live in the exclusive Balcony Cliffs, that swank apartment complex that in another time and age everyone probably had paid millions to live in, so they could have that sunrise, that breathtaking view. Then we'd come back to reality and calculate aloud what kind of effort it might take for our fellow balconeers to make the arduous climb across the cliff face to our location and kill us and pillage our treasure trove—our magic swimming pool, Wick's telescope, the detritus you still found in certain corridors of past lives lived in this place under progressively worse circumstances. Piles of books. A cradle never meant to be broken or sentimental. A few dozen worn shoes. A writing desk. The mummified remains of a dog-like animal that had wandered in, gotten lost, and starved to death, huddled in a corner.

Sometimes, as I drifted off to sleep, I could feel the solid weight of all that earth and remains of the old world pressing down, and experienced a strange kind of comfort. Wick and I were the last inhabitants of the Balcony Cliffs. Over the past years, the foragers and scavengers that had lived in the outer areas of our stronghold had wandered off and disappeared, or been outright killed, and not replaced; more and more, Wick worked by remote control, sacrificing time in the Balcony Cliffs to go roaming out to his contacts after dark, feeling, the trade-off, I suppose, that he'd rather no one knew where he lived and he'd rather not have new employees go through my intense vetting process.

This, then, is where I'd brought Borne, into this cocoon, this "safe" haven that took immense amounts of time and resources to keep safe, that with every day took Wick closer to running out of raw materials for beetles and me closer to having to figure out what would happen after that.

Borne Goop: Repurposing the Goop originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 8, 2011.

Exploring the NYT SF/F Column at Omni

The Amazon book blog asked if I'd write a short piece about my NYT Book Review column on SF and fantasy, so I did: "This is work for a jeweler or a miniaturist, because it's difficult to convey summary and analysis in such a short space. For this reason, I spend many hours just crafting the approach and tailoring the sentences so there's plenty of specific detail and the proper level of context."

Also, a nice shout-out for The Steampunk Bible over at the B&N Review, and a great review at Bleeding Cool.

Not related, but still interesting: Some thoughts on a crappy story from David Moles.

And finally, jerks can write good fiction? Say it ain't so!

Exploring the NYT SF/F Column at Omni originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 7, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck, Entry #2

Archive: Entry #1

Before swooping down to the forest floor to write again, I pondered for awhile about what I should write first, what second, what third. The possibilities opening up before me seemed to contain multitudes. It was overwhelming, if I'm honest. A journal can include everything and nothing, and I am no expert at confessionals. But then I thought about someone finding the book, buried in a box in the dirt, possibly hundreds of years from now…and even though I'm writing it in a dead language, and for myself, there was a kind of tingle of anticipation of that far-future reader, an acknowledgment that some day I will have a reader.

And that reader will need to know who I am, because although raised by what might be termed "humans," I am not human. Indeed, there are no others like me anywhere nearby.

I came here, to this planet, this doorway, as the shooting seed of an adult of my species, and I might have originated galaxies away and centuries ago. Who knows? I don't.

I started polyp-small, and discovered by those who were here first, I was tended to in a laboratory devoted to experiments across time and space. None of them had seen anything like me, either. It soon became clear I was sentient, and growing. That is when they decided to truly take me in and make me one of them. That is when I gained a "father" and a "mother," although these terms have a different meaning to my species.

At first, I was like some cross between lab assistant and lab pet—it was difficult for them to choose how to treat me, and I don't blame them. I did not know my own capabilities, so how could I expect them to? But I continued to grow, and continued to learn, at a prodigious rate. It became clear I was their peer, and then, to some extent, meant to be their leader. Why not? I had no allegiance to my own species, and no aversion to theirs. Besides, their mission appealed to me, for so many reasons.

Yet I am vast, and no laboratory could contain me, ultimately. Now, as an adult, I look like a mountain, but also like a monster from the nightmares of humans. My four legs are enormously thick and rise some hundred feet, where they intersect at the base of what in a human would be my torso; each leg ends in a huge round foot, from which tendrils root into the ground. My torso is also my head and rises another hundred feet, with moth-like feelers protruding out in a feathery profusion. Each tendril is wider than a human being and stretches out a good fifty to seventy-five feet. I can elongate them as necessary.

Atop my head perches the laboratory and some outer buildings, and I have stood here still for so long that a small forest has grown up around the lab. I have no need to move, because from the eyeless crennelated sides of my "face"—my tendrils are my eyes—I can send out a winged probe that, alighting beside the lab, morphs into a vaguely humanoid remote replica. This replica interacts with my fellow researchers, some of whom are, with my blessing, devoted to studying me. This is also how I secretly come to the planet's surface to write these entries.

As I've said, I am the only one of my kind, but in accepting the mission of my fellow researchers, I also hope to one day discover another of me. We must exist, just so widely dispersed that the finding is the difficult part. And in the meantime, every week, from deep inside my body, self-fertilized polyps emerge, and—shot with incredible force, protected by vacuum-sealed pods—make their way out into space. I could keep some of them with me, I suppose, but instinctually I know they would die without their exposure to space. I would be killing my offspring just to have someone similar to talk to. And someday those I send out may come back.

So I talk to the people here, and cooperate with their mission. I monitor the surveillance transmissions from a hundred thousand worlds spread out across a a wide expanse of alternate universes. Earth and its duplicates, its mutants, are our primary concern for now, but not our only one. Some day Earth may fade from our awareness entirely, once the war there has been won.

In the meantime, for all of my size, I am afraid of what is unfolding in the sensory apparatus of the luna moths and our other spy-creatures, across all the Earths, and because that scares me, so too, more and more, my human colleagues scare me.

Although I have not been truly honest about these colleagues of mine. Nominally, they are human. Luminously, they are angels.

And that is enough writing for today. It takes a great effort to write any of these words, especially through a remote probe. Everything about the forest floor distracts me. I have too many senses to remain numb to…anything.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck, Entry #2 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 7, 2011.